Howto read VMFS 3 with a Linux LiveCD



if you need help with tasks like described here feel free to contact me
ulli.hankeln@mightycare.de

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For the video I used a recent Ubuntu 64bit LiveCD available here: ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso

example scenario:

the ESXi-host has two disks - the Linux LiveCD detects them as:

/dev/sda = drive with the ESXi installation and a small datastore
/dev/sdb = drive with a large ESXi VMFS3 datastore
/dev/sdc = a USB-drive that will be used as recovery-target

/dev/sdb1 = the VMFS-volume on the local disk
/dev/sdc1 = the NTFS-volume on the USB-drive

commands used:



sudo passwd
= set the root password

su
= change users

ls
= lists the content of a directory

ls -alh
= lists the content of a directory with more details


mkdir /mnt/ntfs
= create a directory where we will mount the NTFS-formatted USB-drive

mkdir /mnt/vmfs
= create a directory where we will mount the VMFS-formatted ESXi-datastore


mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 /mnt/ntfs
= mount the NTFS-drive

vmfs-fuse /dev/sdb1 /mnt/vmfs
= mount the VMFS-volume

mkdir /mnt/ntfs/2k8
= creates a directory for the 2k8 VM on the USB-drive

cp /mnt/vmfs/2k8/* /mnt/ntfs/2k8
= copy the files to the NTFS-volume


on the ESXi-admin host the result looks like this